Understanding Islam

How To Understand Islamism: Read What Its Leaders Actually Say - Barry Rubin
To read Yusuf al-Qaradawi's 1984 book Islamic Education and Hasan al-Bana is to get an Islamic education. Nobody should be allowed to talk about Islam or political Islamism without having read this or similar texts. Just as Marx claimed in the Communist Manifesto of his movement, the Islamists, too, disdain to conceal their aims. It's easy to see why al-Qaradawi is the leading Sunni Islamist thinker in the world today. He knows how to express his ideas clearly and persuasively.
  Al-Qaradawi does not put the emphasis on Western strength or even on injustice, but on Muslim weakness. He does not flinch from facing the humiliations of the situation. He promises - as the Arab nationalists did 60 years ago - that his doctrine will bring rapid development and tremendous power. Like Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev once did, al-Qaradawi pledges to the West: "We will bury you."
  Islamism is a formula to turn inferiority into superiority, to make the Muslim world number one. It uses religion and is formed by key themes in Islam, but ultimately it has nothing to do with religion as such. This is a political movement. Al-Qaradawi is far more sophisticated than a demagogic firebrand.
  Western observers often take for granted or discount the seriousness of a movement claiming that it is a direct instrument of God's will. They are used to subverting far weaker contemporary Western religious impulses, or look at those from the past that crumbled in a test of wills with rationalism, modernism, material interests, and personal hypocrisy.
  The key challenge is not to cite passages from original Muslim theology to "prove" that Islam is always unchanging and inflexible or to ignore Islam as a factor completely, but to look at the movement's modern strategy and tactics. Almost 30 years after al-Qaradawi clearly explained the movement's ideas, the opponents of Islamism have barely begun their attempt to understand and to educate others on this ideology. (PajamasMedia) Summer Plans - Jennifer Rubin
While you are probably nailing down summer camps or family trips, there is another view of how kids should spend their time. The Jewish News Service reports: "The Palestinian terrorist organization Islamic Jihad held a summer camp in order to groom what a spokesman called a 'strong resisting generation' of Palestinians to fight Israel."
  On the day that those jihadi camps are shut down, the incitement stops and the missiles from Gaza stop, there will be peace. Not before. (The photos of children being groomed into terrorists can be found here. ) (Washington Post)